I’ve had the great fortune to follow excellent leaders both in my professional and private life. As early as high school, I learned a great deal from coaches and team captains in sports. In following people who inspired me, I’ve stolen liberally wherever and whenever I can. I’m going to share the principles others shared with me that I value in the workplace and that I share with my reports.

I’ve been wanting to write a eulogy for my grandfather since the day of his
death, August 20th, 2015. For some insight into my writing process, I tend to
procrastinate an incredible amount while my conscious mind comes of with bon
mots that “I can’t wait to incorporate into the final product.” Ugh.

Today, May 1st, International Workers’ Day, twitter has been alive with chat of
#talkpay. An
article in
ModelViewCulture requests that we share our
current salary, title and experience to combat systemic pay inequality. Though I
don’t agree with everything in the article, I’m choosing to take part.

Last week I shared my secrets to an amazing code retreat. Since then Big Nerd Ranch held an internal code retreat (thanks Stafford) and although I was only able to participate for a couple of sessions due to client work, I learned a couple of things and got to play with a new language. Can you guess which one?!? Read on to found out.

You may have heard about my adventures with code retreats. I greatly enjoy facilitating and participating and over the years I’ve come up with a base itinerary. You can find the official structure here. This is more of my specific predilections. The day won’t follow this exactly and will vary according to skill level and participants interest but read on to see what I enjoy.

Edit: How quickly information becomes stale. Before I had even written this post, the process for acquiring a VISA to visit India had already changed. In fact, it changed just a few short months after I went through the process. Instead of any of the below, go to http://www.visa.blsindia-usa.com/ and follow the instructions.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I greatly enjoyed my visit to India. However, there was a great deal of work to be permitted to travel there. In this post, we discuss what was involved in the preparation.

At Big Nerd Ranch, we set up our lita clone (a ruby based chat bot similar to hubot) so that it would generate Google hangout links for us that would allow us to quickly share the URL with a co-worker or client. But times, they be a changin’.